Every so often you need a movie thatâ€™s so defiantly uningratiating (and often unpleasant) it seems to clear the air, like an especially intense thunderstorm, and demonstrate that art doesnâ€™t always play nice.

The surreal, sexually explicit Mexican art-house horror film We Are the Flesh unfolds in a cruel universe occupied most of the time by only three characters, bringing in other people only to feed them into the meat grinder (figuratively â€” or maybe literally; itâ€™s that kind of film). It is steadfastly not for everyone, yet I feel itâ€™s important to note such work; it is also heartfelt about the point it seems to be making about the soulless squalor of society â€” or at least the society it depicts, which may not have a lot to do with society as we know it. Art doesnâ€™t always play fair, either.

In a way, We Are the Flesh is a contemptuous fulfillment of what voyeuristic audiences claim to want from entertainment. Itâ€™s full of sex, drugs (a substance in an eye-dropper), and violence. But these things are presented in an aggressively weird, anti-audience manner; it gives you what you want in ways you didnâ€™t want it. The movie isnâ€™t completely devoted to Funny Games-style game-playing, though. On another level it seems quite sincere about its message of madness, and admirably committed to it. It has an addled purity, and the purity extends to its rigorous if sometimes chaotic use of cinema to express inexpressible states of emotion. The camera trembles, spins, lurches, zooms, and other times stays pristinely still or lingers. The color scheme begins with despairing grays, the shades of a corpse, but then the corpse gradually wakes up until blood flushes its skin with red.

The movieâ€™s very context itself is untrustworthy: whatâ€™s real and what isnâ€™t? Thereâ€™s no baseline of sanity here â€” it begins on a savage and dimly intelligible note and keeps playing that note. Faced with nonsense, the brain seeks the solace of allegory. Everything comes to seem abstract, everyone a representation rather than a person. Thatâ€™s also how a brain can shield itself from onscreen atrocities, and there are a lot of them as We Are the Flesh winds down. Maybe itâ€™s best simply to say weâ€™re getting life as seen through the filter of an outraged, terrified artist, a heightened, gory reality presided over by demons.

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